Webinator Search Help

The Webinator's search can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be.
Usually you will just need to enter a few words that best describe that
which you are trying to locate. To perform more complicated searches you
might use any combination of logic operators, special pattern matchers, concept expansion,
or proximity operations.

Example: nature conservation organization

Query Rules of Thumb:

If you get too many junk or nonsense answers, try:

Add some more words to your query.

Decrease the range of the Proximity control.

Change the Word Forms control to Exact.

Look at the Match Info and see why they are showing up.

Use the Exclusion Operator (-) to remove unwanted terms.

If you are searching for a phrase, hyphenate the words together.

If you don't get any answers, or just too few:

Remove some more words to your query.

Examine your spelling.

Increase the scope of the Proximity control.

It just might not be there?

Overview of query abilities

The Webinator is an example Texis application and
as such it shares its text query abilities with all of Thunderstone's
products. Throughout our documentation you will see references to Metamorph
or Texis, this is because all of our products share a common text query
language. This document provides only a brief overview of this language.

Controlling proximity:
Mastering the usage of proximity gives the ability to locate
answers with greater precision. The Webinator input form gives
you several options to control the search proximity:

line All query terms must occur on the same line

sentence Query items should all reside within the same sentence

paragraph Within the same paragraph or text block

page (default) All items must occur within same HTML document

The bar-graph display ( )
will be shown any time a ranking search was performed (eg. all searches
except Show Parents).

Ranking Factors
The ranking algorithm takes into consideration relative word
ordering, word proximity, database frequency, document frequency,
and position in text. The relative importance of these factors in
computing the quality of a hit can be altered under
RANKING FACTORS
on the Options page.

Applying Search Logic
Texis and Metamorph use set logic for text queries. Set logic
is easier to use and provides more abilities than boolean.
The examples below make reference to single keywords, but
keep in mind that each keyword can represent an entire list of
things or any of the special pattern matchers.

Sets (or lists) of things are specified by placing the elements
within parenthesis, separated by commas. example:(bob,joe,sam,sue) . In the examples below, you could
replace any of the keywords with a list like this.

The default behavior of the search is to locate an intersection
(or 'AND') of every element within a query. This means that the
query; "microsoft bob interface" is the equivalent to
the boolean query: "microsoft AND bob AND interface"

'-' (without)
The '-'(minus) is the most commonly used logic symbol. It
means the answer should EXCLUDE references to that item.

'+' (mandatory)
The '+'(plus) symbol in front of a search item means
that the answer MUST INCLUDE that item. This is generally
used in conjunction with the permutation operation.

'@N' (permute)
The '@' followed by a number indicates how
many intersections to locate of the terms in your query.
This may be confusing at first, but it is very powerful.

Notes: Only the '+' and '-' operations are valid
with a relevance rank search.

Natural Language Query:
You may enter a query in the form of a sentence or
question. The software will automatically identify the important words
and phrases within your query and remove the "noise words".

If improperly used these pattern matchers can slow queries.
Therefore they require other keyword(s) in the query, and
are disabled entirely under Page proximity. For more details
see the Vortex manual on
Query Protection.

We call this morpheme processing, and it is generally smarter than
a traditional "stemming" algorithm. It doesn't just rip the end off a word,
it actually checks to see if it could be a valid form of the search term.
click here for more info

Notes: Thesaurus terms are also treated in the same manner.
Words smaller than 4-5 characters will not be processed.

When a query is submitted it will come back with another query form
and up to 10 matching documents. If there are more than 10 answers,
a link at the top and bottom of the list will allow you to view the next 10
in sequence.

The input form at the top allows you further tailor your query to home-in
on the desired answers, or to submit a completely new query without having
to navigate back to the original input form.

Each answer in the result set will have a format similar to the following:

1:

THE DOCUMENT TITLE (hyperlink to original)This is the document abstract. It consists of the first few hundred characters of text of the matching document. It is followed by the size of the document in parenthesis...
http://www.thesite.com/thepage.html

The Match Info link will show you the context of your answers within
the matching document. Matching words will be shown like this.

Clicking on any match term will take you to the next matching term.
A summary at the top of the in-context view shows information about the
document including the time it was last indexed by the Webinator.

The Find Similar link will find documents that are similar to the corresponding result. It
does this by reading the original document to ascertain its main subject matter,
and then conducting a relevance ranked search for those subjects.

Result documents are ordered from best to worst match. The bargraph display
will indicate the overall quality of the match.

Note:The document you click on may not be ranked as the best match.
This is because other documents may contain more information about the
overall subject matter than the original.